The Best Fashion Moments On Film This Year

While I’m sure a Best Sound Editing award can really zing a career along, Oscar nights comes and goes, but a bona fide fashion moment on film is forever. Just ask Scarlett O’Hara. Or Mary Zophras - the costume designer behind Emma Stone’s canary yellow La La Land extravaganza which, though it failed to help the film take home last year’s top prize, has surely become the most scrutinised American tea dress since Monica Lewinsky’s. Of course, it was Moonlight that took home the Best Picture honour last year, before its stars promptly booked follow-up campaigns for Calvin Klein. There’s just something so potent about fashion on film, that perfect mix of character and cloth, of gorgeous lighting and increasingly beautiful actors who, these days, essentially look like friendlier models but with lilting voices and the ability to cry on cue. Truth be told, it’s been quite a low-key year for cinema, with a lot of "yeah it was great" and "I actually really enjoyed it" films slugging it out for statuettes on Sunday night. But if the films have been fine, the fashion moments have been fabulous. Here are my awards for the standouts of the year. (Includes some gentle spoilers).

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Best Reminder Of The Perfect Folly Of Teenage Style

Call Me By Your Name - Elio’s New Romantic makeover

What teen can honestly say they never reached for the hair dye/crimping sheers/bedazzler/eyeliner pencil when their love life was on the fritz? Though, much like everything else in Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeous paean to peaches and 1980s bohemia, I’m not sure many of us looked as on fleek as Timothee Chalamet’s crestfallen Elio as he steadily weeps by his parents’ fireplace. What’s so clever about the clothes in this scene is that, yes, on the one hand, he looks completely amazing, with a Flock of Seagulls hairdo artfully pinned down with a Sony Walkman metal alice band, while sporting a banger of an ambisexual blouse that wouldn’t shame a Miu Miu catwalk. Yet he also looks a tiny bit daft. It’s a brilliant marker that he’s hit "the experimental years", that he’s growing up and time marches on. And that love can sometimes be as fleeting as a hairdo.

Best Insta-Friendly Fashion Moment Wasted On A Film Set In 2002

Lady Bird - Thanksgiving

Poor Lady Bird. As if she didn’t have enough to handle with that searingly accurate portrayal of a toxic/loving mother-daughter bond, she also finds the perfect thrift store gem for Thanksgiving round at her new boyfriend’s rich grandmother’s house eight years before Instagram has even launched. What a waste! If there was a more perfect dress-for-likes to be found at the cinema last year, I didn’t spot it. In fact, second place probably goes to the deeper fuchsia number Lady Bird wears to prom. But props to this gloriously basic winner: soft pink, charity shop brocade, and a believable sewing machine tweak by a mother in a constant state of semi-fury with you. Saoirse Ronan finally arrived as a fashion force this year. This charming, obvious moment had a lot to do with it.

Best Pearl Clutching Gasp At The Sheer Beauty Of It All

Phantom Thread – The Sage Green Dress

In a year where a lot of the nominated films feel light on genius, it’s impossible to deny the hand of a master at work in Phantom Thread. As director Paul Thomas Anderson told Vogue in January, “Nowhere are artistically self-obsessive people more at home than in the fashion business.” And so it proved. The fictional House of Woodstock, run by the brittle-yet-brilliant Reynolds Woodstock (Daniel Day Lewis in full middleclass despot mode), begins to throb with a sexy new energy when a fit model called Alma (Vicky Krieps) turns up. Whether it is a wonderfully kinky bout of toast scraping, or a midnight raid to retrieve a ball gown from a drunken American heiress, every frame looks perfect – but none more so than when Alma takes to the showroom floor in this sage green number for a photoshoot. Fashion gasps all round.

Best Thematic Use Of A Turtleneck

Get Out – Rose’s Quick Change

I’ll try and steer clear of spoilers in case any of you dumdums have neglected to watch the most exciting film of 2017. Let’s put it this way: this turtleneck is literally shorthand for everything you need to know about Allison Williams’s character in this movie. Every. Last. Thing.

Best Non-Gucci Gucci

The Shape of Water – Amphibian Man

If Guillemo del Toro hadn’t invented Oscar season’s unlikeliest sex symbol, surely Alessandro Michele would have got around to it sooner or later?

Best Jumper Of The Year (Or Any Year)

God’s Own Country – Gheorghe’s Knitwear

Who would have guessed that an impoverished Romanian farmer (played by Alec Secareanu) looking for work on the bleakest of Yorkshire farms would happen to own the world’s best "boyfriend jumper"? It’s in so many pivotal scenes of the BAFTA-nominated weepy it’s basically the third lead, and there has been feverish interest on Tumblr about where it’s from. The answer? In keeping with his naturalistic approach, director Francis Lee only wanted his characters to wear clothes they could have realistically purchased. “I think it’s from somewhere like Primark,” he has confessed. “It’s synthetic, it’s not even wool! And there were three of them!”

Best Panic Diffuser

Darkest Hour – Clemmie Churchill’s Entire Wardrobe

No one – and I mean no one – is having as much fun on screen this awards season as Kristin Scott Thomas in Darkest Hour. It’s highly likely that Gary Oldman’s extraordinary facsimile of Winston Churchill will grab the goods come Oscar night, but do spare a little praise for Scott Thomas’s joyful take on his wife Clementine, a notorious clotheshorse and a jolly-good-sort. She practically Charlestons around the film, in a series of impossibly chic looks that give much needed energy and verve to proceedings. Her beautiful 1940s threads are a key reason Jaqueline Durran has been nominated for Best Costume Design for film. (As it happens, Durran is a double nominee this year, having also received a nod for her lavish work on Disney’s monster hit Beauty and the Beast…. zero fashion moments in that one though.)

Best Rainy-Day Solution

Blade Runner 2049 – Joi’s Yellow Mac

Actually, the post-apocalyptic rainwear is so consistently excellent in Dennis Villeneuve reboot of the Blade Runner franchise it could warrant an entire list of its own. But I’ll settle for Joi’s massively on trend, sexy pac-a-mac in nicotine neon, that could easily slot into any wardrobe in spring 2018. It feels extra prescient this week. After those drones at Dolce last weekend, surely "purchasable holographic companions" like Joi (played by Ana de Armas) will be on catwalks any minute now?

Best "I'm Going In" Dress

Girls Trip – Dina’s Airport Ensemble

IMHO Tiffany Haddish was absolutely robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nod for her hilarious turn as potty-mouthed Dina in the highly enjoyable Girls Trip. She has so many choice looks in the film - including that tiny Moschino club dress covered in dollar signs, and the world’s shortest Anthony Vacarello number she wears to meet Diddy. But one look at her in this riot of colour before all the filth kicks off, a dress the costume designers apparently bought at some random local LA boutique days before filming, and I’m literally cringing with delight. A pure joy machine.

Best Deployment Of Millenial Pink (And Gen Z Teal)

The Florida Project – Moonee and Halley

Firstly, shout out to production designer Stephanik Youth for covering the motel where most of the action takes place in the most savage expanse of pink mortar since that wall by the Paul Smith boutique in LA. And the fromboise fun doesn’t end there. While the set-up verges on super tragic, with a mother (Bria Vinaite) on the game as her daughter (Brooklyn Prince, the world’s sweetest six-year-old) is left to fend for herself amongst the waifs who live near Disney World, the colours of this movie act like balm. The pinks and turquoises beloved of children and tweens, they are woven through the clothes in almost every scene, as the lines between adulthood and childhood blur. Brilliant job by Fernando Rodriguez, who got his big break here after working as wardrobe supervisor on Moonlight.